EUROPE: FALL/WINTER; Potsdam, Refuge of Prussian Kings

SOLDIER-KINGS of Brandenburg-Prussia and emperors of modern Germany for fewer than 50 years, the Hohenzollerns have gone down in history as war makers who came late to the top table of Europe, and were forever trying to catch up. This is a bit unfair. Sometimes they longed to escape from all that straining and campaigning: they were passionate art collectors and, perhaps less well known, creators of spectacular gardens and parks. Around the royal garrison city of Potsdam they devised a huge private arcadia that remains exceptionally harmonious and casts a deep, romantic spell.

Potsdam has always been the perfect break from metropolitan Berlin. Less than 20 miles away on the Havel River, Potsdam is actually older than the capital, and has often chosen to ignore Berlin and deal with the rest of the world directly. Over the last three centuries, four rapturous foreign affairs -- with Holland, France, Italy and England -- plus a Russian flirtation (not to be confused with the military occupation of recent times) have endowed Potsdam with palaces, villas, country houses, woods, lakes, orchards and planned neighborhoods. The scale is both expansive and fragile. After reunification, Unesco placed the entire ensemble on its World Heritage List in 1990. Much has been done to preserve and restore; much remains to be done.

There are six Hohenzollern parks in the area, all open to the public. Sanssouci, the New Garden (Neuer Garten) and Babelsberg surround the center of Potsdam; Sacrow is a mile and a half to the northeast; Glienicke and Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island) lie just inside Berlin. Each is quite unlike the others.

Last October I stayed for six days with Potsdam friends, and went everywhere except Peacock Island, which I knew from earlier trips to Berlin. I focused particularly on Sanssouci and the New Garden. My visits were mostly in the middle of the week so, except for Sanssouci Palace, there were few people about. I also explored two memorable Potsdam survivors: Alexandrovka, a housing colony built in 1826 to cheer up homesick members of a Russian male choir, and the Telegrafenberg, a science park more than a hundred years old.

A week would not exhaust all there is to see, particularly if you love walking and biking and can combine Potsdam with day or evening trips into Berlin. The central streets are strollable and compact -- at most a square mile -- while streetcars and buses are good. With the exception of Sacrow, which is the farthest and quietest of the parks, I walked nearly everywhere.

The master hand behind Potsdam's triumph of the picturesque is Peter Joseph Lenne (1789-1866), a landscaper as gifted as Humphrey Repton and Capability Brown, the Englishmen who inspired him. Lenne, who worked on all the Potsdam parks, shared Brown's passion for grand spaces and heroic trees, but was less ruthless. He actually encourages walkers, sometimes with pathways or a linden allee, more often with tricks that are so subtle you don't realize they are being performed. His parkland eases you around each corner, to the top of the next hill, or to the Havel's edge. He uses grass like water and makes the meadows swirl and flow around the great oaks, beeches, linden, chestnuts and plane trees. Lenne's supreme forte, however, lay in coordinating what others had done before, and he in turn inspired his successors. This line between past, present and future was maintained for nearly 200 years, and is the real secret of Potsdam's harmony.

The Hohenzollern romance with art and nature began in the Rococo age of Frederick the Great and ended two centuries later in the darkest days of World War I. Each monarch added something of his own, usually in tart reaction to his predecessor: Frederick the Great built a golden Chinese teahouse and an acropolis of fake ruins for Sanssouci; Frederick William II, an elegant marble palace and a Gothic library in the New Garden; Frederick William III, a huge belvedere and tiny temple with a tent on top on the Pfingstberg, or Whitsuntide Hill, above the New Garden.

Diversity was everything, and all this embellishment had to be admired. If there was a stand of trees or a stretch of water worth seeing, there had to be a temple or a belvedere from which to admire it, and leading architects like Karl Fried rich Schinkel (1781-1841) were delighted to provide them. Public observation became the new social compulsion: Schinkel's jolliest building, called the New Curiosity, is a rotunda that stands by the road at the edge of Glienicke Park where it commands a perfect 360-degree view of anyone traveling between Potsdam and Berlin. One of his loveliest is Charlottenhof, an intimate classical villa in a quiet corner of Sanssouci park. Even the gawkiest fantasies are softened by Lenne's trees.

The most visited buildings are the first and the last to be built: the palace of Sanssouci in its own park to the west of the center of Potsdam, and Cecilienhof in the New Garden to the east.

Crowning a terraced hillside, ravishing Sanssouci (''Without Cares'') is a small French summer palace of the 1740's, all silver, ivory and rose inside. The palace was large enough for Frederick, his dogs, servants, artists, musicians and philosophers (most famously Voltaire), but not for the king's unloved wife, Elisabeth-Christine, or for guests. Joie de vivre and good taste shine through every room. Since 1995, Frederick's bones have been buried beneath the terrace with his favorite whippet dogs, as he had always wished, having lain for 159 years in the Garrison Church of Potsdam and then, after a dash across Germany in the last weeks of World War II, at Schloss Hohenzollern near the Black Forest. Last October, someone had placed oak leaves and a magenta orchid on his stone, apt tribute to a soldieraesthete.

The grandest building in the 717-acre Sanssouci Park is the New Palace at the west end, effectively an all-suite hotel of the 1760's for Frederick's state visitors. Now gorgeously restored, it is finer, inside at least, than its more famous contemporary, Schonbrunn in Vienna.

But hardly anyone loved it. One of the few royal couples who actually enjoyed living there were Vicky and Fritz, Queen Victoria's daughter Victoria and her liberal husband, Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia. Fritz was the German Emperor Frederick III for 99 days in 1888, until he died of a lingering cancer in the throat. His last journey -- transported from Berlin by boat, to lessen the pain, makes almost unbearable reading. Vicky and Fritz lie side by side in the Italianate Friedenskirche, or Peace Church, at the eastern end of the Sanssouci park; if you can get hold of her letters, the generous, intelligent Vicky will be your heroine for life.

If the Peace Church may be seen as a Victorian protest against Frederick the Great's Frenchified godlessness, then Cecilienhof, which stands in the 183-acre New Garden, is an Edwardian reaction to Sans souci's exquisite discomfort. Sumptuously half-timbered and the ultimate in family living, the last royal palace of Europe was begun by the kaiser in 1914, out of an absolute, if confused, affection for England. Now partly a museum and partly a hotel, this is the house where Stalin, Truman and Churchill met for the Potsdam Conference in 1945, pronouncing Prussia officially dead and sharing Europe among them. The Iron Curtain fell, indeed, within sight of the bedroom windows. The Hohenzollern arcadia was divided by watchtowers and barbed wire. Parts of it remained out of bounds for the next 45 years.

Today the healing is well advanced. Summer boats take a gentle five minutes to make the perilous former fugitives' crossing of the Havel between the Heilandskirche (Church of the Holy Redeemer) in Sacrow and Glienicke Park in Berlin. As you walk around the northern tip of the Heiliger See (Sacred Lake) in the New Garden -- a no man's land before 1989 -- the dazzling white ''ruin'' on Peacock Island, a mile and a half away, slips in and out of view. From the Pfingstberg, you can again see the waterside Marble Palace, Babelsberg Palace and Schinkel's Glienicke games pavilion known as the Kasino. Stonemasons match up the fragments of vandalized terra cotta -- a hoof, an ear, a Pegasus wing -- as they rebuild the Pompeiian parlor in the Belvedere. A mile away, work on the little Baroque hunting lodge of Sacrow has begun. Forty-five-acre Sacrow is the youngest and most magically peaceful of the parks on the Havel. Boats to the church are rare out of season. I took a 20-minute bus ride to get there and watched through the window as lakes rose and fell like pools of mercury in the gathering dusk.

Potsdam town is almost as seductive as its parks, but there is no disguising the fact that the easiest way to arrive -- on a 22-minute train ride from Berlin -- is also the least attractive. In the last month of the Second World War, Allied bombers destroyed the station, the town palace, the Lustgarten park, the Baroque Garrison Church and the streets surrounding the great dome of Schinkel's Nicholas Church. At the end of the 60's, the East Germans drove a triumphalist highway through the ruins, put up a 20-story hotel and crowded Schinkel's church inside a set of Modernist boxes, now falling apart.

Don't despair. A sparkling new station has opened, and two historic gardens in the area are being replanted. Walking north, to the left of the Nicholas Church, you are soon in a grid of little Baroque and Rococo streets largely untouched by the war -- the true center of town. The Mittelstrasse in the gabled-brick Dutch Quarter -- now with a nice balance of housing, cafes and shops -- is one of the prettiest streets in Germany. From here, you can walk west to Sanssouci, east to the New Garden, or farther north, into another Potsdam romance -- Alexandrovka.

Here, 12 full-size authentic wooden Russian houses, their balconies bursting with scarlet flowers, stand among overgrown orchards on a site shaped by Lenne like a Roman hippodrome, with a diagonal St. Andrew's cross of roads through its heart. They were built to honor the Prussian princess Charlotte, who became Czarina in 1825, and to house the King of Prussia's Russian choir. Why a hippodrome? Why St. Andrew? I don't know. I also don't know why I find this completely unnecessary place so moving. But I do.

Alexandrovka, too, is being fully restored -- orchards replanted, weeds taken up. For just around the corner, in April, is the site of BUGA, the robustly abbreviated Bundesgartenschau, or National Horticultural Show. Poised between Sanssouci, the Pfingstberg and the open countryside to the north of town, BUGA is not even primarily a show about flowers and gardens, although there will be plenty of them. It is a six-month festival and long-term investment program that aims to kick-start the economic regeneration of Potsdam and the surrounding land of Brandenburg. BUGA is reclaiming the huge Bornstedt Field for the public after centuries of military use, reconnecting major features of Lenne's master plan and bringing a once-famous Arts and Crafts garden back into public view.

Karl Foerster (1874-1970) was a plantsman of worldwide influence until history obscured him. He was distinguished for spectacular delphinium, phlox, asters and ornamental grasses, which means that if you visit between late June and mid-October, you will see some or all of these in the dense two-acre garden now run by his daughter, Marianne. I saw the sunken garden when all the air smelled of honey, and the blues, purples, lavenders and pinks of Michaelmas daisies were being matched by the first fiery shrubs of fall. It was stunning.

Even Hohenzollern research-technology was placed in a landscaped park, and Potsdam's most outrageous surprise is found on a wooded hill south of the city where the romance of pure science still stirs. On the Telegrafenberg astrophysicists like Einstein studied the sun through one of the biggest refracting telescopes in the world, which celebrated its centenary last year. And below the late-19th-century Grosser Refraktor, the architect Erich Mendelsohn erected one of the most exuberant buildings of the 20th century, the so-called Einstein Tower.

With deep, eyelidded windows, black Cubist furniture and retractable capped roof, this Expressionistic phallus has been repainted its original color and now looks like a rocket made of vanilla ice cream. By the time Mendelsohn drew his first lightning sketch in 1920, the kaiser had lost the war and Germany was a republic. What could have been the Hohenzollerns' last hurrah became the first icon of a short-lived, brave, new modernist world. But arcadia, slipping into the deep double-sleep of the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, watched the Hohenzollerns depart, the soldiers march away, and survived.

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The telephone code for Germany is 49; 331 for Potsdam, 30 for Berlin. The Potsdam Tourist Information Office is at Friedrich Ebert Strasse 5, 14467 Potsdam; 27 558-0, fax 27 558-99. An excellent Web site for the parks of Potsdam is www.spsg.de.

Sightseeing

Sanssouci Palace, in Sanssouci Park, 96 94-202, fax 96 94-107, is open daily April to October from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., November to March until 4 p.m.; $4.50, at 2.2 German marks to the dollar. Tickets for guided tours (in German with English leaflets unless you book an English-language tour) must be bought in advance for a set time, and they sell out early.

New Palace, in Sanssouci Park, 96 94-202, fax 96 94-107, is open every day but Friday April to October 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., November to March until 4 p.m.; $2.75. Guided tours $3.65 (winter only).

Zum Fliegenden Hollander, on the corner of Mittelstrasse and Benkertstrasse; 275 030. Traditional German tavern in a restored house in the heart of the Dutch Quarter. Beer, wine and pub food. Beer $1.60, glass of wine $3.20, meals $6.75 to $9.

The 137-room Steigenberger Maxx, Allee nach Sanssouci, 90 910, fax 90 91 909, is at the budget end of a leading German chain. A bit antiseptic, but ideal for access to Sanssouci Park. Doubles $105 to $115.

Relexa Schlosshotel Cecilienhof, Neuer Garten, 37 050, fax 29 24 98, with 42 rooms, occupies a wing of the former royal palace where Stalin, Churchill and Truman conferred in 1945. Luxurious comfort, good restaurant, in the idyllic park. Doubles $132 to $170 and suites from simple to genuinely Hohenzollern, $215 to $680, with breakfast.

Books and Maps

In Potsdam, look for Christiane Theiselmann's ''Potsdam und Umgebung'' (DuMont, $20). German only, but great pictures.

The best bookshop in town is Internationales Buch, corner of Friedrich Ebert Strasse and Brandenburger Strasse; 291 496.

A good map is the Falk plan of Potsdam and area ($4).

Getting There

S-Bahn trains on line S7 and regional trains on lines RE1 and RE3 leave every few minutes for Potsdam from Berlin Friedrichstrasse, Zoo, Charlottenburg and Wannsee stations. Or you can take S-Bahn line S1 from Friedrichstrasse or Potsdamer Platz to Wannsee and change there. A Tageskarte -- One-Day Travel Card -- for all three zones of the Berlin system includes Potsdam and costs $4.50.

In summer, Peacock Island is best reached by boat, from Potsdam or Wannsee; in winter, by bus 316 and tiny ferry from the S-Bahn station at Wannsee.

Within Potsdam, most of the parks are served by buses or streetcars from Potsdam railroad station and Platz der Einheit just north of the Nicholas Church.

MICHAEL RATCLIFFE is a former theater critic and literary editor of The Observer in London.